Omar Bradley

Biography

Omar Bradley was born into poverty in Randolph County, Missouri, in 1893, the son of a schoolteacher. He was working as a railroad boilermaker when he won a place at West Point, where he graduated in 1915 in the class that produced Dwight D. Eisenhower and dozens of other generals. During the First World War he guarded copper mines in Montana, and between the wars he taught mathematics at West Point, attended the army's staff and war colleges, and worked under George Marshall at the War Department. In 1941 he became commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning.

In the Second World War he oversaw the conversion of the 82nd Infantry Division into the first American airborne division, served under George Patton in North Africa, and then commanded II Corps in Tunisia and Sicily. He led the First Army in the Normandy landings and, after the breakout, the Twelfth Army Group, which grew to 43 divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest American force ever under one field commander.

After the war he ran the Veterans Administration from 1945 to 1947, improving its medical care and the delivery of education benefits. He became Army Chief of Staff in 1948 and the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1949, and in 1950 was promoted to General of the Army, the last American to receive five-star rank. During the Korean War he backed Truman's policy of containment and helped persuade him to dismiss Douglas MacArthur in 1951. He left active duty in 1953, chaired the Bulova Watch Company's board from 1958 to 1973, and died in New York in 1981.